Guest Blog: Make the Words Count and Don’t Count the Words by Scott Colbert
Scott is a fellow Skullvines Author. His novella, Barbed Wire Kisses, is a serial killer/western tale and is available here.
A few weeks ago Brian Keene posted on Twitter that he’d written 40,000 words in a day. He followed that up on his blog with a bit more detail, where he revealed the total word count for Friday-Sunday was approximately 85,000 words. Once I picked my jaw up from the floor, ceased weeping and gnashing my teeth, I developed word envy.
While not the first time I suffered from this disease, it was certainly the most acute. My novella “Barbed Wire Kisses” is about 37,000 words and it took me almost 6 months to finish a first draft, and another 6 months of rewrites and edits before I sent it to my publisher. During the writing process, I would even post a daily word count on Facebook and Twitter, as I had seen other writers do.
Then, I started really paying attention to what other writers were putting out and I felt, not lazy really, but inadequate. If so and so is writing X amount of words a day why can’t I do that? What’s wrong with me? Many of the writers I follow on various social networks are far more prolific than I am.
Since I started writing seriously again about 5 years ago, I’ve managed a novella, a poem and a short story. The novella and poem were published, and I never sent the short story as I was content to just put it up on my blog. So I guess I could say I have a 100% success rate in terms of getting published (to spin it on the positive side) but I still have word envy from time to time.
It’s gotten better as time marches on, and I’ve come to the following conclusion (no matter how obvious this may be to someone else, it wasn’t to me until I read Brian’s post): we all have different ways of doing things. Some go to the gym every day, some a few days a month and others, none at all. Is one any more or less dedicated by the time spent working out? No, I don’t think so.
If I write 1000 words a day, and someone else 4000, does that make me any less dedicated to my craft? Again, no, I don’t think so. It’s about knowing what works best for me, what the best schedule is, for maximum results. I wrote the last 3500 words of “Barbed Wire Kisses” in one day, and that is the one section I spent the most time rewriting. What good is it to write past my limit (both physically and mentally), when I have to spend more time rewriting and editing? I’m not putting my time or energy to good use.
In the end, it’s not about the word count, it’s about making the words I do put down on paper count. Knowing what works best for you, and not trying to top or compete with others, not only makes us better writers, it also makes us better people.
Well said, and just to back you up: Joe Lansdale had told me in an interview something similar. He’d said how he only writes three to five pages a day, but he does it five days a week, so for him, consistency is key. But he said others like Dean Koontz will put in ten to twelve hours in a day. Every writer ticks differently.
I don’t disagree that you can write fewer words and be just as dedicated to your craft– anyone who writes 45,000 words in a day is going to be throwing at least some of that out– but I think that to be a writer, you have to write. I know that writing a couple hundred words every few days is hard and time consuming for me, and writing fiction believably is more than I can do right now, but I don’t consider myself a dedicated author, either. I think that rewriting and editing can really sharpen a story, as well– so even though you had to rewrite the ending of your novella, that wasn’t necessarily a negative thing.
I completely disagree with the analogy to exercise, though. My sister, who took a job so she could be next to her gym, has a personal trainer, and swims and does yoga for an hour each, every day, is much more dedicated to exercise than I am, going to the gym for resistance training for maybe 40 minutes once or twice a week and chasing my kids around the house. At the beginning of his career the great Ray Bradbury committed himself to writing a story every day- he was writing for survival- and I’m sure a lot of what he wrote was terrible. But look at what he wrote that was great. It doesn’t happen unless you do it.